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Music

Concert Footage Gets A Timelapse VFX Makeover

Pixel Idiots add a touch of time-lapse psychedelia to your standard concert footage.

Lamb Ocean Reflow from Pixel Idiots on Vimeo.

The timelapse film technique is not without its fans and there’s no shortage of films that use it to create stunning images, like Norwegian filmmaker Mr TSO who makes captivating landscape and nightscape videos. But it can be a tad overused, so its good to keep things fresh by putting a little spin on the technique—which is why we’re giving plenty of doths of the cap to filmmakers Pixel Idiots, who have not only given time-lapse a visual twist, but also given the bog-standard concert footage a shot in the arm in this interesting visual experiment.

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They recorded a concert by Mancunian electronic band LAMB in a series of 350 still frames taken through a very dark neutral density filter. They then took this footage and added some VFX trickery blending it together and edited the whole thing down to the sequence above. They explain on their Vimeo page:

The starting point was a 4K timelapse still photo sequence with an exposure time of nine seconds per frame through a very dark ND filter.

The whole LAMB concert at the 2011 Lowlands Music and Visual Arts festival was thus recorded in 350 still frames.

Several conventional time-stretching techniques were tried to make the 14 seconds filmclip longer in duration, but none worked well. Finally the Oflow optical flow plug-in of NukeX (The Foundry) was tried.

At first we thought the result was a disaster. The optical flow algorithm treated the light changes between the different Lamb songs as objects and the images were fractally morphed at random, giving results that were totally unpredictable, but very beautiful. So we went on.

Later stages of time stretching through optical flow morphing were done in Adobe After Effects, which uses the same algorithm under the name timewarp. The original 350 frame sequence was thus stretched to approximately 26500 frames from which the HD video was edited.

The final product took them a full two weeks to render, but it was worth it because the results are great—the concert footage has turned into morphing phantoms of exploding pixels as the photos bleed into one another, looking like colored smoke is bending and stretching the video. Maybe it’ll be a new dawn for concert footage—we have plenty of experimental visuals while at the concerts, but how about for viewing the footage afterwards? Then you can remix it and use it for VJing at the band’s next gig in a kind of feedback meta-concert.